We spectated the Timmerman Airport (Milwaukee) Flour Drop on Saturday—what a fun event!

First, getting there. We took off at 8:52, with two Cessna 172s in front of us, and a Diamond and Bristell behind us. The randomness of when the airport is “busy” always amuses me. There’s probably some name for this sort of (perceived?) phenomenon.

It was so hazy out from all the Canadian wildfire smoke. The sky looked clear-ish from the ground but once we were a few hundred feet up in the air we really saw the haze. I mean, duh, but I thought it had cleared up a bit since earlier in the week.

This was my first time flying in that amount of haze. On previous flights, I’d been purposefully relying less on ForeFlight (iPad flying app) for air traffic in favor of using my eyeballs and the windows, but I leaned back in on it a bit on this flight due to visibility (until WiFi disconnected when we were 10 miles from our destination airport, naturally).

The 172 that left at the same time as us was on a parallel course for most of the flight but eventually went west when we turned east. And… these are the details where I lose most of you. Just kidding! I know no one made it this far.

We landed and parked in front of the FBO (fixed base operator) and hung out and attended the safety briefing at 10 am. We were there to spectate, not participate, but wanted to get an idea of what to expect so we can participate next year.

It was straightforward—there was a big target painted on one of the grass landing strips to try to hit with your bag of flour. Every participant got two small (1 lb?) bags of flours to drop over two attempts (one each flyover). Each plane had to have a pilot and a passenger, and only the passenger was allowed to drop the flour. You had to remain 150’ AGL and maintain a reasonable cruise speed. There would be a maximum of three planes in the traffic pattern at a time.

It would be cool if I had a picture of the target, or a bag drop, right? Ha. We stayed on the ramp, sat under the wing,

and had binoculars to watch, so I don’t have any cool up close pics. They did post some pics and a video on their Facebook page though! So check that out!

We got the handheld radio out to listen to ATC (air traffic control) and enjoyed watching everyone. Even though we were far away, I got a pretty good sense of where they were on the target since white flour exploded when it hit the ground!

At one point ATC came on to warn everyone about birds over the airfield, and then I heard popping noises and realized someone from the airport was driving a truck around setting off… fireworks?… to scare away the birds! I’d never seen this before. It did make them leave though.

Some people came over and talked to us, which was nice (we were being a bit anti-social, sitting under the wing, but we wanted to be in the shade).

The first person said “You two look like you know what’s going on!” which I thought was really sweet. So we explained what we heard in the briefing, and which way the planes would go and how they’d enter the pattern to do the drop, etc. She also asked some questions about becoming a pilot, saying her husband might be interested.

While we were talking with her the first plane came back from their drop and I noticed there were two kids in the back of the plane and I said “Oh they took two kids up! I bet they had a blast!” Then she said those were her kids and husband and she was going to go up too (you could pay for a ride… those must have all been commercial pilots on those flight since private pilots can’t accept money for a ride, but only a pro-rata share of the cost to fly 🤓).

I told her that I became interested in planes at the same age as her kids because I got to fly in a small plane like that. And she was like “And look where you are now!” Really nice lady.

Later another person came by and asked if their kid could see our (rented) plane and of course Steven offered for the kid to sit in the pilot’s seat! That was super cute.

There were a lot of kids there and it made my heart happy to see the joy of aviation shared with such a young community! (Okay, totally sidetracked but speaking of young, when we were leaving our home airport that morning one of the pilots was having the kid with them talk to ATC… I mean, if a kid gets to, I should get to try, right?! I was telling someone at work that I did comms a few weeks ago and they were like “is that allowed?!” And I was like, “yes, people have their kids talk to ATC.” Case in point.)

One of the amazing parts of this event is everyone got free food! From a delicious taco truck! IT WAS AMAZING! That’s so generous and we were really appreciative.

We ended up chatting more with the lady we talked to earlier, then to the guy who parked his plane next to us. He has a sports license and an experimental plane and was telling us all about the benefits of his plane and the fun trips he does trailering it around the country and flying over cool scenery. It’s fun to talk to other pilots and hear their tips and stories.

We had our plane reservation until 2:00 so we had to do our briefing and preflight around 1:00 to take off at 1:30 and missed the awards. But I think we saw all the drops!

There was more haze on the flight back.

We flew the same way there and back as we did last time, avoiding the Delta and Charlie airspace right by Timmerman. I didn’t do an amazing job navigating us. I need to learn how to plug that route into the Garmin. We always manage though.

Our home airport was super busy when we were 15 miles out. So busy that the METAR (weather report) didn’t change over when it normally does. You’re supposed to have the most current weather info when you call 10 miles out so Steven diverted off our path to give it a few more minutes but it never updated. So we called in with the old info (and it updated after we landed, like 10+ mins later than normal. ATC does the recording so them being too busy doing actual ATC to record it makes sense!). Steven said next time he’ll just call in with whatever was current right before his call.

This was such a fun, well-run event, and I’m so glad the airport saw my original post about visiting their airport and told me about it. We will definitely be back next year! And we’ll spectate the Spot Landing Contest they have in September. And we saw a flyer for a STOL (short takeoff and landing) competition at another nearby airport in July we definitely want to go to! We love watching videos of STOL planes and can’t wait to see a bunch of them in person.